Hunt goes on for missing in Cuba blast

HAVANA— Relatives of the missing searched Saturday for victims of an explosion at one of Havana’s most luxurious hotels, the Hotel Saratoga, that killed at least 27 people.

A natural gas leak was the likely cause of Friday’s blast at the 96-room hotel, officials said. The 19th-century structure in the Old Havana neighborhood did not have any guests at the time because it was undergoing renovations ahead of a planned Tuesday reopening.

But the area in front of hotel was busy at the time of the late-morning explosion that blasted the streets with concrete debris.

On Saturday evening, Dr. Julio Guerra Izquierdo, chief of hospital services at the Ministry of Health, raised the death toll to 27 with 81 people injured. The dead included four children and a pregnant woman. Spain’s President Pedro Sanchez said via Twitter that a Spanish tourist was among the dead and that another Spaniard was seriously injured.

Cuban authorities confirmed the tourist’s death and said her partner was injured. Dalila Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the Tourism Ministry, said a Cuban American tourist was also injured.

Representatives of Grupo de Turismo Gaviota SA, which owns the hotel, said Saturday that 51 workers had been inside the hotel at the time, as well as two people working on renovations. Of those, 11 were killed, 13 remained missing and six were hospitalized.

Gonzalez said the cause of the blast was still under investigation, but a large crane hoisted a charred gas tanker from the hotel’s rubble early Saturday.